


you are my family tree

by beanarie



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Backstory, Families of Choice, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 07:17:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18633415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie
Summary: Clint sees better from a distance, so it makes sense he doesn't notice until she's stepping into range for the kill shot.





	you are my family tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [renegadewriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/renegadewriter/gifts).



> I was assigned ren (renegadewriter) for a fandom Secret Santa on lj--yes, lj--ummm *checks notes* 8 years ago. Their prompt was this "Child Natasha is recruited by SHIELD after Clint makes the call not to kill her". It was a wonderful prompt, that I wrote almost in full, but could not make it by the deadline. Endgame inspired me to dust it off and post it.
> 
> Warnings: Mentions of rape of a minor and sex-trafficking. Also, while this fic is about a purely platonic connection between an adult and a minor, there's a scene that blurs the line, but only due to manifestation of the minor's past trauma.

This dude sweeps into the interrogation room like some kind of futuristic pirate, with his bald head and his goatee and his eye-patch, and one thought floats to the surface. This is not the public defender Clint had been expecting to see.

"Pulled this robbery thing off before, haven't you, son?" the dude says, his nose stuck in a folder. "But you're without a paddle this time. Someone got killed."

"That's not on me," Clint says. The handcuffs are starting to piss him off, but he knows better than to bust out of them. They'd just truss him up with those plastic ties. Them shits are the _worst_.

The dude looks up. "So who was it on?"

Clint looks at the mirror and starts throwing out numbers, guesses of how many people are watching him on the other side. An uneasy voice inside his head, growing steadily louder, suspects none. 

The dude chuckles. "No, you didn't just fall off the turnip truck, did you? What _I_ think is you fell off the circus train. Am I right?"

Clint looks down at the table, blood starting to pound in his ears like bongo drums. 

"No records to prove it, of course. But you fit the description of a kid who went missing from social services nine years ago along with his big brother. Just as the circus was coming through town. Two years after that, they started putting a face on their posters that looked a bit like yours. Hawkeye, the boy who never misses. Or something to that effect."

It was actually 'World's Greatest Marksman' but Clint has more pressing concerns than his pride. He left the circus ten states and almost a year ago. And like the dude said, there was hardly a paper trail. "Who the hell are you, man?"

~

"So, Agent Barton. Do you think you'd have a problem killing a woman?"

"You could ask one of the six female targets you've assigned me over the last four years," Clint says. "Only..." Coulson closes his eyes in mild exasperation. Clint doesn't smirk, but he wants to.

Fury laughs at them. "Well, we'll see," he says, sliding over a file. "This one's a looker."

"They call her the Black Widow," Coulson supplies. "She's a little too good at what she does."

~

They assign Hill as his handler. He's never worked with her before. She's relatively new, only a year or two older than he was when he was recruited, meaning barely legal to drink. But he's heard good things.

The job takes hours of recon. Long, long hours of recon. So long Clint temporarily forgets the significance of AM and PM, and Hill begins almost every communication with a yawn. But Clint isn't prone to whining. Especially not now that he's perched on the roof of a condemned apartment building with a cherry view of the room where Black Widow currently hangs her hat. All the woman needs to do is wander into his sites and they can all go home. 

Widow glances out the window. Her mountain of dark red curls has been tied back, and for the first time he sees her, just her, without layers of makeup and other honey-pot trappings she uses to snare her prey.

Holy shit, she's a goddamn child.

"What the hell," Clint blurts out.

"Hawkeye? Report."

"Sorry, I..." Hill couldn't have known about this. Fury, maybe. Bump that up to probably because that fucker seems to know everything. But, Hill, no way. 

"Agent, talk to me."

Clint squeezes the trigger and the corner of the window-frame explodes. Widow takes off like a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit. "No shot," he mutters. "I repeat no shot. Target's on the move."

"What?"

"I'm aborting the mission."

"You are not."

"Look, getting thrown in an Eastern European prison may be your idea of a good time, but it ain't mine. I'm gone."

He practically flies down his safety ladder, touching down lightly on the ground, and she hasn't said a word. Suddenly she comes out with, "Meet me at the rendezvous point at 0100."

"Yes, ma'am." There are several options for how Widow intends to get out, but Clint's looked this neighborhood up and fucking down over the last forty-eight hours. He's confident he knows which she'll choose.

~

Hill comes out of her car swinging. "Okay, you've got two minutes to explain yourself before I bust out the protocols for a rogue agent."

"Like I said, I took a shot and I missed. You're expecting a different story?"

"You haven't missed a single shot in the four years you've been attached to this organization," Hill says. Semi-green she might be, but she's not dumb. He'll have to remember not to lie about anything she has the ability to research.

"Okay then," Clint waves her to the back of the car and throws the door wide open. "Well, I've got her bagged and tagged. You go ahead and do it now."

Black Widow glares at them, her blazing eyes expressing all the hatred and outrage she can't give voice to. Forget the gag and she looks like a kid having a tantrum over not being allowed to go to the mall with her little friends. 

Hill's swallow makes a gulping sound. "She looks younger than her photo."

"You think so, too?" he says.

"Significantly."

~

"Just what in the hell do you expect me to do with a kid-sized sociopath?" Fury asks, tossing Clint a thick manilla envelope. "Here, have some psych evaluations. You'll be reading those tonight, but to sum up? Where most people have a brain, this girl has a mine-field. She's really your number one draft pick for our next wave of recruits?"

"All due respect, sir. You really think she was honest with SHIELD shrinks?" 

Fury just stares at him.

"All the skills she's been force-fed, I wouldn't put it past them to include cheating psych profiles."

"For what purpose exactly?"

Clint shrugs. "Intimidation? We know she comes from somewhere. If she's crazy-dangerous, stands to reason her people might be even worse. There's a chance we wouldn't want to mess with that."

"You know what? You just earned yourself five feet of responsibility. You remember Basic Training, don't you?"

"Hard to forget," Clint says.

"Good, good." Fury grins, then reminds Clint why his stomach tends to drop when that happens. "You get to put her through it."

~

Week one is all about endurance testing. Swimming, sprinting, ropes, all the resources the base allows him to throw at her. Her times are all top tier. Nothing close to Captain America's numbers, but far enough beyond a normal human he suspects some kind of tinkering, genetic engineering, selective breeding, something along those lines. Clint mulls over adding a few tenths of a second to each of her times, prevent her from standing out quite so much. His better judgment wins out, though, thwapping him for even considering something so unwise.

The mess hall is empty when he lets her stop for lunch. At the bench next to him, mopping up chili with a hunk of cornbread, her posture doesn't slump at all. Her breathing is completely normal. The only sign she even did anything is her hair, still wet from the pool.

"Where do you get all that energy?" he asks. "Oh, yeah, I forgot. You're twelve years old." 

"I'm not twelve. I'm fourteen." Despite more than a hint of an accent, her English is better than his. Clint would be embarrassed if things like that mattered to him. She puts her spoon down. "Does this body look like it hasn't gone through puberty?" She leans toward him ever so slightly, just enough for the roundness of her breasts to push through her baggy t-shirt.

So they've reached the hitting on your trainer portion of the evening. Clint takes a swig from his carton of orange juice. "Seriously?" he says.

"You think I'm a virgin?" she challenges, drawing closer.

Clint very pointedly keeps his eyes on his tray. "Why should you be? I wasn't when I was your age."

"So your first, she was like me. She was young and perfect, like this?"

Perfect is such a subjective term. "Kid, that hand gets any further up my thigh, you will not love what happens."

She withdraws her hand, but he knows instantly that she isn't done so he holds off on the sigh of relief. When she grabs his shoulders and throws her weight against his, Clint goes with it, allowing her to tackle him and pin him against the ground.

"Tell me again you don't want me," she says, her voice low and throaty. "Convince me."

He closes his eyes, willing his body to remain completely still. It's a little tough, he's burning up thinking about the monster that put this in a child's mind as a viable form of manipulation. If she pushes the issue, he's going with plan B. Admittedly though he'd like to avoid kicking her in the face if at all possible.

Eventually she lifts herself off of him and stands frozen in one spot, blinking. 

"We're done for today," Clint announces. He dumps the contents of both trays in the garbage, his appetite a distant memory now. "Go read a book. Brush your hair. Make a quilt out of everyone's discarded blankets. I don't give a crap as long as you get to sleep early. Tomorrow starts at the asscrack of dawn." 

The next morning Clint pulls the blinds on his window, sees the rain coming down, not in buckets but a steady sustainable stream, and he grins, big and wide. 

He continues grinning from under an umbrella while she does suicide runs in the mud. 

She stops after a while, even her energy levels have to flag sometime. He drops the umbrella and jogs over to where she's half bent trying to catch her breath. "Is it starting to sink in yet, how big a mistake yesterday was?"

"You don't get that I'm not a baby," she protests, gasping a little.

"You don't get that you _are_ , whether you feel like it or not. You want to use sex against people, fine, I won't pretend it's not part of what you'll be asked to do." Hey, this isn't finishing school here. "But not for at least a couple of years, and especially not because you feel like you have to."

"I wanted to do that," she says. Her head is down like it's a confession, but her voice cracks a little too blatantly, and he snorts.

"Bullshit. You feel powerless here and you thought that would change if you got some leverage over me." He lowers his voice, leaning in closer. This is the part that needs to really sink in. "Listen to me. You're not powerless. You make decisions all the time. And you don't get that the ones you've been making are gonna end with you put down like a rabid dog." She doesn't flinch, but he can feel her wanting to. "That stunt with the head shrinkers, what was that? You told them you used to kill kittens for fun?"

She shakes her head the tiniest bit. 

"What?" Clint demands.

"I- I didn't say it was for fun." 

Suddenly he can see it clear as day. A girl half the size of the one in front of him, being handed a weapon and told that she needs to be strong. They provided the wood for her coffin, but she had to hammer in each nail herself. 

Goddammit. 

"Go-" He coughs. "Go to the showers and get warmed up. If I keep you out here any longer, they'll get me for child abuse."

"Are we finished?"

"Not yet. I'll meet you at the barracks in one hour."

That gives him sixty minutes to figure out what the hell he's doing next.

It turns out, he only needs twelve.

~

"You were taught a lot of things at a really early age that nobody has any business knowing," he says, notching the arrow and pulling the bowstring. "This is what I was taught."

~

She doesn't like the bow so much. At least, she isn't nearly as comfortable with it as someone with her history could be. Clint feels tight and itchy for the rest of day until he realizes that he's taking it _personally_. Then he tells himself that he's being irrational and to cut it out. He doesn't have that luxury any more.

The next day they spend on the ropes course. "No shooting range today?" she asks. "I wanted to try the bow again."

Clint realizes that he probably sucked big time when he was just starting out, even though he can no longer remember a time when the bow didn't feel like part of his arm. "Tomorrow," he promises. "We'll do it every other day."

~

Right off the bat, she looks Coulson up and down, a tiny smirk lifting one side of her mouth. Clint is slightly worried. She still thinks she needs that energy to intimidate people. He's hoping she grows out of it soon, preferably before she meets Fury face to face.

Coulson turns his back on her to shake Clint's hand. "Not that I don't find the attention flattering, Widow," he says dryly. "But I'm engaged to my high school boyfriend. And even if I weren't, I wouldn't be a pedophile. Put it away."

Coulson is here to take Clint back to the field, and he had the foresight to let her in on the initial briefing. She doesn't know where exactly Clint is going, but now she has a general idea of what he'll be doing, and why he'll be gone for the next week or two. He even gives Clint just enough time to squeeze in an archery lesson before he goes.

"How many of your trainers did you sleep with?" Clint asks. She has the bow in her hand. He's found she's more likely to answer questions when she's preoccupied.

"In Russia? More than half." She looses the arrow, smiling a little at her result. "The women mostly weren't interested."

That, again, is not the truth. But it isn't completely a lie, either.

~

So Coulson neglected to mention the bad guys had a camp of buddies only a radio signal away. Clint doesn't blame him. Intel is rarely a hundred percent. 

But still, he could do without the bruised ribs and the corresponding goose-egg on the back of his cranium from crashing into the ground. Even when the armor does its job, getting shot is ass.

"Barton, I'm not sure that's such a good-"

Fuck that. Being an adult means having the right to decide when to go to sleep, and he is choosing this moment to exercise that right.

He wakes up in med bay, his shirt gone, probably shredded by the medics, and an icepack held to his side with a few layers of bandage. He looks up and jumps a little bit. 

She is there, looking at the insides of her nails like this is all really boring to her. "I wasn't expecting you to be so sloppy in the field," she says. 

Clint laughs and laughs, even as his mild concussion punishes him for it. Everyone who says she has no sense of humor, they don't see how hilarious she really is. Of course, it's completely unintentional. But funny is funny, and this refried Soviet bullshit she's serving is the best thing he's heard in a long time. "That's the thing, kid. I'm a human being. This is how it goes when a human being takes a job that involves getting shot at a lot. One day I'll get hit and I won't get back up again. Maybe sometime soon, maybe in forty years. I'd prefer forty years."

She stares at him for a long moment, then shows him the back of her head as she turns to leave. "Stop calling me kid."

"Stop being fourteen," he returns.

~

"Red Room," Sitwell says, passing him a manilla envelope. "That's where she comes from."

Clint browses through the first few pages. "They've been doing this since Stalin?"

"Before that, we think. They've operated in waves. One of their guys got the band back together right before the Iron Curtain fell. Last ditch effort to save the empire, maybe. I don't know. These guys are tight-lipped like you wouldn't believe."

Clint skips to the end, assuming that's more relevant to the here and now. He's right. They have more info on the current baby assassins cohort than he'd expected. "And her name is Natasha Romanov," he mutters. "If they didn't change it."

"There aren't any pictures attached to that list," Sitwell points out with a frown. "How do you know?"

Clint's smile is almost proud. "That's the one with the best numbers."

~

He finds her sitting on the steps of the mess hall, deft fingers converting her hair into a long braided rope down her back.

"Shore leave," he announces. "We get to go off-base until this afternoon."

There's something distinctly unimpressed about her weaving now. "A test," she says. 

He crosses his arms. No point in denying the obvious. "Can you pass it?"

Her fingers go still.

"Yes," he says. "The answer is yes." No means a whole slew of possibilities he doesn't want to think about.

~

They go to a diner in town. He buys her breakfast. As soon as the server walks away, he says, "Well, dig in, Natasha."

She smiles down at her steak and eggs. "I prefer that to kid."

"Too bad," he says. "You're still the age you are. Anyway, why didn't you tell me your name?"

"I'm not sure it is my name, really," she says, her mouth half full. "But I think I'll keep it."

"And your other name?" Clint uses the ketchup bottle to make a wobbly picture of a spider on his plate.

She laughs, destroying his art by dragging a french fry through it. " _Definitely_ keeping that."

~

They visit the diner for the next three Thursday mornings. He always pays, but she insists on taking the cash up herself. 

She changes when she reaches the front register. She gets brighter, like a kid with no history, just future. The owner of the place talks to her in cheerful, Polish-accented English, and she responds in kind.

The girl _changed_ her accent. 

Clint's interest is piqued. Oh, hell, yeah. He runs the owner's name through the databases. But there's nothing apart from naturalization in '72 and a divorce in '89.

"Okay," Clint asks finally. "So why him?" 

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she says.

~

Clint's eyes fly open, heralding full awareness before the second knock at the door. He stands as the door opens, clad only in boxers, and Hill purses her lips at him.

"Widow's gone," she says.

"What."

She places a hand on her hip. "The time it would take me to repeat myself could be better spent, don't you think?" She hasn't sounded the alarm, he realizes. She's giving him a chance to fix this.

He's starting to like Hill. A lot.

~

So Clint is back to Widow-hunting, for a very different purpose this time. 

He hopes. 

Bus stations, train stations, and that private airfield eight clicks away aren't really feasible. If it's one of those Red Room skeeves come to take her home, they're long gone by now. Assuming it's not that, and assuming she's not a fucking plant playing the long con, there is something it could be. Clint's got a hunch, and his gut has been right enough times it'd dumb to ignore it.

He finds her flattened against the side of the house. She doesn't react to his approach, so he coughs. "The hell you think you're doing, kid?"

She puts a finger to her lips as a car pulls into the garage. He flattens out right next to her. The car door opens, letting out two people he can't see, but he remembers the diner owner's voice. The second is a young woman, apparently tired but excited. Clint picks out a word here and there from the Polish she's speaking. She's asking him about a job, when she starts, how much she'll get paid. His tone is easy to identify, even through the language barrier. The guy is yessing her to death. Clint chances a look around the corner of the house to catch them before they get to the front door. While she's chatting away, he's looking all around him at his sleeping neighborhood. Like he doesn't want any witnesses.

Clint rejoins Natasha as the two go inside. "Son of a bitch," he whispers.

"I saw it in the way he looked at me," she says under her breath. "Like he would leash me, own me if he could." Clint shakes his head, too disgusted to do anything else. "There are two more in the basement. I could hear them crying earlier."

"You could've freed them while he was gone," Clint says, frowning at the incomplete puzzle. "Why didn't you-" Oh. "Kid. Were you waiting on me?" He barely, just barely, catches the tiny lift of her shoulder in the darkness. "Could've left me a note, Jesus."

"No, I couldn't," she replies. 

It's almost fair that she get to put him through a test. That's pretty much all he's been doing with her since they met.

~

The next twenty minutes go by in a blur. Triaging, dividing tasks, tying up the scumbag, freeing the girls. It's all a testament to their training.

Of course, there was a second scumbag in the house neither of them knew about. The world slows down real quick the moment he and his gun get the drop on Clint.

Instead of glancing off his rib, this bullet punches right through. He knows because of the growing wetness at his back. There's no pain, not yet, just a thick, woolly cocoon of shock that mutes everything, numbs his limbs, and makes his vision fuzzy.

Blood bubbling through his fingers, Clint falls. The world has narrowed to a needlepoint. None of it matters, none of it. He loves his life, but in the back of his mind he always knew he wouldn't have it for long. Going out like this isn't much of a surprise. And he doesn't do regrets.

There's just one thing. 

_What's going to happen to her now?_

"Clint," she says, and it sounds like _Get up_. He can feel her fingers at the back of his neck, holding up his head. " _Clint_."

"Sorry," he whispers. 

He holds out a little hope that this isn't actually the end, because that was embarrassingly inadequate.

~

When he wakes up, he sees her laugh for the first time. And then she shoves away tears with her knuckles.

"I don't know why I let it affect me," she says, sniffling. "You get shot all the time."

He isn't capable of much of a response, but his thoughts are super uncharitable.

"When I'm done with training," she says, placing a straw between his lips. His throat begins to feel a lot less like a desert. "I want to be your partner. I don't trust anyone else to keep you from stepping in front of bullets."

"That'll take years," he reminds her in a rough half-whisper. Twenty, if it were up to him.

"True," she says. "You think you can manage to stay alive until then?"

He sucks in his breath when he moves wrong. 

~

Clint shifts in his seat, tightening his arm across his side against an unhappy frisson of pain. "Go on," he says.

She remains frozen in place, the arrow notched and ready. "Why didn't you bring the compound bow? There was something I wanted to try."

"Because shut up and shoot." Yesterday Clint smashed the compound bow when his shot missed the bullseye by almost a full inch. It's not a memory he enjoys revisiting.

A pair of steel toes come to a stop next to him. "Agent Barton?"

Clint turns awkwardly. "Uh, yeah? You know I'm on the disabled list."

Agent Wu looks unreadable under a pair of nearly opaque shades. "Director Fury would like a few minutes of your time."

Clint doesn't look at Natasha. She doesn't need to know how terrified he is right now. 

~

"I don't know about this, sir," Clint says.

"She needs normalcy. She's still a kid. You've domesticated her-" Clint coughs, regretting it instantly, and Fury rolls his eye. "So to speak. Helped her sharpen her skills in a useful way. Made her ready for any situation."

"And the situation you chose is... boarding school." Clint drums his fingers on the table. "I hope you'll have people checking up on her."

"You'll even be one of them, every so often."

~

Natasha looks confused. "The only other girls I've known have been my sisters."

"Sisters?"

" _Sisters_ ," she says, and then he gets it.

"Well, kid, you had to know at some point in your life you'd be interacting with people who _can't_ kill a man in less than three seconds." The tiny quiver in her lower lip, it isn't fear exactly. More like carefully restrained apprehension. 

"It'll be okay," he continues. 

Her nod is far too mechanical to be genuine agreement. "You promise?" she whispers.

"Nope," he says, and she looks up. "Can't tell if you really want it to be or not. That's the deciding factor."


End file.
